An Iraqi Christian family fleeing the violence in Mosul sleeps inside Sacred Heart of Jesus Chaldean Church in Telkaif, Iraq, Mosul July 20. (CNS photo/Reuters )

Each semester, I teach a course called “Eastern
Christianity and the Encounter with Islam.” And next year I have a book with a
similar title, Eastern Christian
Encounters with Islam, being published by Routledge. One reason I started
teaching this course in 2008 was because of the vast ignorance about Eastern
Christianity in any form, and the even greater ignorance about the 1,400-year
history of Eastern Christians living alongside Muslims in places such as Syria,
Egypt, the Levant, Iran, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula.

Another motivation, moreover, was the urgency I felt to
draw attention to the appalling, enraging, and deeply saddening exodus of
Eastern Christians out of Iraq following the 2003 war, which the late Pope John
Paul II so rightly opposed. Since the war, Iraq’s ancient population of
Chaldean Catholics, Assyrian Christians, and others has declined drasticallyby
well over 50 percent. Many of those Christians have been killed, but many more
have been driven from their homes by the rise of fanatical Islamic groups. The
latest such group is ISIS, an exceptionally nasty alliance of murderous thugs
who have all but decimated the Christian population in Mosula population that
has been in that northern Iraqi city for nearly 2,000 years.

When I begin teaching the long history of indigenous
Christian populations in today’s Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and the
Arabian Peninsula, I am invariably greeted with complete amazement that such
peoples exist. The concept, in particular, of such a creature as an Arab
Christian is especially incomprehensible to most of my students. All Arabs are
Muslims, right? Arabic is only used in the Quran, right?

The idea that Arabic is the language of anything other than
the Quran, and not also one of the myriad languages early Christians spoke (see
Acts 2:11), as well as one of the myriad languages into which the Bible has
been translated and still read today by Arab Christians (whose New Testament
uses the same word for God as Muslims use: Allah) is a bridge too far for far too
many American Christians. But, to be fair, even among scholars knowledge of
Eastern Christianity has been low until the start of this century, and
knowledge even among specialists of Assyrian, Chaldean, Arabic, and Coptic
Christians (inter alia) has been even lower.

It is a welcome development, then, that two scholarly
acquaintances of mine, Samuel Noble and Alexander Treiger, have just published
a new book, The Orthodox Church in the
Arab World, 700 - 1700: An Anthology of Sources (Northern Illinois
University Press, 2014). I
interviewed Sam and Sasha, and they mentioned just how much of the ancient
literature of Arabic Christianity remains untranslated and unknown today. There
is a long, rich, and important history of Arab Christianity, as well as of Arab
Christian-Muslim relations, that is, in many respects, coming to an end before
our very eyes.

It is very sad, and a bit ironic, that the world is finally
waking up to the reality of these communities just as they are being violently
extinguished or otherwise extirpated from their homelands. These incredibly
patient, long-suffering groups, who have seen many invasions and lived under
many regimes, almost all of them ugly and exploitative in some form at some
point, are now on the verge of extinction. As the Iraq-based Chaldean Catholic
Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako recently put it, even at his worst the maniacal
tyrant Genghis Khan was not as murderous and bloodthirsty as ISIS and similar
groups today.

And what are we doing about it, now that we are at least
minimally aware of the existence and persecution of Christian minorities in
Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and elsewhere in the region? This is not an idle or
optional question: much of this suffering has been caused by American
interference in the region since 2003, and so America must face up squarely to
the question of responsibility. While, as I always say to my (predominantly
female) students, Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, and Bashar Al-Assad were
nobody’s idea of men to bring home to mom, at the very least we have to credit
those dictators for keeping a lot of the crazies under control and allowing
Christians to live not perfectly but certainly far more peaceably than they
have since the removal of the first two. (Christians could surely here borrow
Henry Kissinger’s famous phrase: “They may be SOBs, but they’re our SOBs!”) Today, things are worse all
around for Christians thanks to our ostensibly well-intentioned efforts in the
region.

So, to repeat, what are we going to do about it? I do not
think that the US government is going to do anything, which is a badge of shame
and a blood-stain on its reputation.

I direct my question in particular at American Christians,
and especially Catholics. We, as members of the largest religious body in the
world, should surely be able to command more attention than we do, and bring
more pressure than we do on events around us. We could, and should, bring
pressure to bear on Washington in a variety of forms, but we can more easily,
and perhaps more profitably, bring discipline to bear on ourselves. Last year
Pope Francis garnered headlines by calling for a day of prayer and fasting for
Christians in Syria. Let us use this ancient and powerful spiritual weapon on a
weekly basis. Eastern Christians have long fasted on both Wednesdays (the day
of Christ’s betrayal) and Fridays (the day of his death).

Perhaps, starting next week, Christians in the
West should adopt this twice weekly fast for the express purpose of begging
God, as the Byzantine liturgy for the Exaltation of the Cross (September 14)
states, to “save Your people, O Lord, and bless Your inheritance, granting
victory to Your faithful people against enemies and protecting Your Church by
Your Cross.”

[Editor: The headline, written by CWR editors, previously referred to "Arab Christians," but has been corrected to "Middle Eastern Christians," as Arab Christians are distinct from Chaldean Catholics, Assyrian Christians, and other Christian groups in the Middle East.]

About the Author

Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille

Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille is Associate Professor and Chairman of the Department of Theology-Philosophy, University of Saint Francis (Fort Wayne, IN) and author of Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy (University of Notre Dame, 2011).

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